To grant music a moral function, however, it would seem necessary to amputate and discard all its pathos, everything heady and orgiastic in it, and, finally, to deprive oneself of poetic intoxication in any form. For music does not always convey the serenity of wise men: it fevers those who listen to it, drives them mad. Music is derationalizing and unhealthy. Thus in Tolstoy’s famous moralizing novella (The Kreutzer Sonata, also not a little misogynistic), a musical work is accessory to an illicit passion. Proudhon himself, by inclination a serious, moral mind, accuses those who advocate the aesthetics of the game and “art for art’s sake” of degeneracy. Alas, an eagerness to resist temptation is no less suspect than temptation itself. The Puritan grudge against music, the persecution of pleasure, hatred of seduction and spells, the antihedonist obsession: in the end, all these are pathologies, just as misogyny is pathological.
Music and the Ineffable (1961)
Vladimir Jankelevitch
Sonata Kreutzer (1901)
René-Xavier Prinet
